Ohhh … boy. Albert the Pious undertakes to instruct us on the grave danger same-sex marriage poses to religious liberty; unfortunately, he proceeds from an embarrassingly childish conception of each.
These are days that will require courage, conviction, and clarity of vision. We are in a fight for the most basic liberties God has given humanity, every single one of us, made in his image. Religious liberty is being redefined as mere freedom of worship, but it will not long survive if it is reduced to a private sphere with no public voice. The very freedom to preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ is at stake, and thus so is the liberty of every American. Human rights and human dignity are temporary abstractions if they are severed from their reality as gifts of the Creator. The eclipse of Christian truth will lead inevitably to a tragic loss of human dignity.
Where to begin?
Freedom of religion has always meant freedom of worship under our Constitution — and no more. Does Mohler honestly not know he is parroting the long-discarded and –discredited arguments of his own denomination’s founding? It has always been the right of the government to restrict activities sanctioned by religious belief when they were contrary to the public interest.
Zoroastrians are not free to leave the corpses of their dead on hilltops so that vultures will eat them and free their souls, for instance. Southern Baptists are not free to own slaves, no matter how theologically sound the argument for slavery may be (God said so, which certainly ought to settle the matter).
The freedom to preach the gospel is not endangered. It is true that preaching grows increasingly disreputable, as it ought, but there is no reason to suppose that (even!) Steven Anderson is in imminent danger of being hauled-off to the pokey. Parents may still debase and psychologically abuse their children by telling them they were born irremediably foul and deserving of eternal torture. Holy Men may still stand in their pulpit and howl and bellow that good, decent, godly people hold the pleasure of Our Invisible Friend to be more important than even their wedding vows.
There is no barrier or danger, that is, to Mohler continuing to be a Southern Baptist, and odious.
And does it really need to be said that religion — or at least Christianity — is the implacable enemy of human dignity? Christianity’s indispensable metaphysical claim is that men are born foul, guilty, deserving of eternal torture … on and on. If you don’t believe that, if you don’t believe in Original Sin, then you don’t believe you need a remedy, and Christianity has nothing on offer.
Human dignity cannot be grounded on the belief that the bald fact of humankind’s existence is an offense against the cosmos itself. Period. Christianity undermines human dignity.
As for marriage itself, Mohler has made plain through the years that its purpose is procreation, in order to perpetuate the tribe. It is not about mutual loyalty and shared ambitions, about building satisfying lives together, because his white-trash sewer-god considers those things a presumption upon His sovereignty; He alone is worthy of your loyalty, and He will tell you what are your ambitions.
Mohler believes in animal husbandry — and that’s it.
I no longer believe that Albert Mohler has thoughts. I believe Albert Mohler has a catalog of uninformed and ill-considered exclamations in his head, and that events cue-up and trigger them.
Bah.
What is really going on here is what I approvingly noted above: Preaching is, and rightly so, growing disreputable. Thanks to popularizers of Biblical research such as Bart Ehrman, Bishop John Spong, on and on, a steadily-growing number of the public know what appalling intellectual dishonesty issues from the average pulpit — and grants it no more than the contempt it deserves.
Christianity is untrue, and its tribal, cult-like ethics are very bad — and humanity is leaving it, and the rest of the Abrahamic faiths, behind. That is what is driving much of our contemporary political turmoil — the world is leaving pious buffoons like Mohler behind. Seriously: Just as defeating communism was the great project of the last century, defeating backward-looking yahoos like Mohler is the most important work of this century.